Rosy Days of Fatherhood, Far From 'The Scarlet Letter'; A Rediscovered Story by Nathaniel Hawthorne Recalls His Romps With His Young Son

By MEL GUSSOW

Charming is not a word often associated with Nathaniel Hawthorne. But that is exactly the word that comes to mind for readers of Hawthorne's story ''Twenty Days With Julian & Little Bunny by Papa.''

That story long ago found a place in Hawthorne's ''American Notebooks,'' where it was read by scholars, but remained obscure until Paul Auster, the novelist, rediscovered it and brought about its publication for the first time as an individual book. Recently published by New York Review Books, it is pocket size, 72 pages, preceded by a long introduction by Mr. Auster. It is, Mr. Auster writes, a portrait of Hawthorne as ''the historian of everyday life'' and is ''a humorous work by a notoriously melancholic man.''

In the summer of 1851, when Hawthorne was 47 and had written all his major works including ''The Scarlet Letter'' and ''The House of the Seven Gables,'' his wife went to visit her parents, taking their daughters, Una and baby Rose. She left their son, Julian, with his father in their home in Lenox, Mass. At 5, Julian was a babbling brook of ideas and emotions. The first thing he said after their departure, according to the story, was: ''Father, isn't it nice to have baby gone? Because now I can shout and squeal just as loud as I please!''

For three weeks father and son lived alone (with the help of a housekeeper), and Hawthorne kept a diary of their daily activities. Habitually Hawthorne did not write fiction during the summer and so was able to devote himself to his son. The diary offers a portrait of Hawthorne in a lighter mode, delighted -- although sometimes quietly exasperated -- by the constant demands of the boy, but a generous family man with infinite patience and a deep appreciation of nature.

Here is Hawthorne climbing trees, scaling stones with his son and playfully wrestling with him. They take long walks in the Berkshire woods, indulge Julian's pet rabbit. Hawthorne rescues a cat from a cistern. Julian reveals a natural curiosity, asking why a rainbow is not called a sunbow. In the course of the book, the two become as close as a father and son can be.

One day on the way home from the post office, they sit down in a grove and Hawthorne reads a newspaper. ''While thus engaged,'' he wrote, ''a cavalier on horseback came along the road and saluted me in Spanish; to which I replied by touching my hat, and went on with the newspaper. But the cavalier renewed his salutation. I regarded him more attentively, and saw that it was Herman Melville!''

Melville lifts Julian up and puts him in the saddle, ''and the little man was highly pleased, and sat on the horse with the freedom and the fearlessness of an old equestrian.'' Sometime later Julian confided to his father that he loved Mr. Melville as much as he loved him, his mother and his older sister. There goes another foreboding image from American literature.

''For many years I've been a great admirer of Hawthorne,' Mr. Auster said recently. ''There is a deep affinity I have for his writing and also for him as a man. The more you penetrate the peripheral writings, the letters and diaries, you see this tremendous wit that was there from a very early age.'' Next year will be the 200th anniversary of Hawthorne's birth.

In ''The American Notebooks'' (published by Ohio State University Press), he said, ''you see Hawthorne talking to himself on very intimate terms, and thinking up ideas for stories, and the prose is lightning fast and lean.'' So far as he knows, ''Twenty Days'' is the only self-contained work within the notebooks.

''What it proves,'' he said, ''is that Hawthorne was a human being just like all of us. He happened to be a great writer on top of that, but writers have lives, too. It's rare that we get a glimpse of this kind of relationship in a writer's life. It should be the bible of all the housefathers, the stay-at-home fathers today.''

In the book Julian is such an ingratiating child that readers may wonder about his adult life. He went to Harvard and became a writer, publishing more than 40 novels, but never equaling his father's success. His books about his family, beginning with ''Nathaniel Hawthorne and His Wife,'' were better received.

With his editor, Edwin Frank, Mr. Auster looked at the original diary and other items collected at the Morgan Library in New York. He said that Hawthorne and his wife, Sophia, kept a separate notebook in which they both wrote about their children. ''What was so touching,'' he said, ''was that the book must have been lying around the house. If you turn the pages, you see little pencil drawings by the children, scratches right over Hawthorne's text.''

When his wife returned home, Hawthorne gave her ''Twenty Days,'' and she blacked out several lines -- to protect their privacy, Mr. Auster assumes -- although there was never an indication that it would be published. Like a photo album, it was for family consumption. ''We remember real events in mental pictures of course,'' Mr. Auster said, ''but I think a well-written paragraph captures more of reality than a photograph.''

Always shy, Hawthorne avoided contact as much as possible with his neighbors, even, Mr. Auster said, hiding behind trees so as not to talk to people he knew. The main exception was Melville, who lived nearby and looked upon Hawthorne as his mentor. Sophia Hawthorne called him ''Mr. Omoo,'' a reference to Melville's second novel.

When the Hawthornes were married, they lived in the Old Manse in Concord, Mass. (the setting for Hawthorne's ''Mosses From an Old Manse''). ''As a wedding present,'' Mr. Auster said, ''Emerson hired Thoreau to plant Hawthorne's garden.'' Mrs. Hawthorne was, he added, a good writer as demonstrated in her letters.

''From the kitchen, looking out on the Concord River in the winter,'' Mr. Auster said, ''Sophia writes to her mother a hilarious passage about Hawthorne, Emerson and Thoreau ice skating on the frozen river. She describes how they looked: there's old Mr. Emerson, who is only a year older than Hawthorne, bent over, straining to keep upright. There's Mr. Thoreau jumping around with dithyrambic leaps, 'very ugly, methinks,' and Mr. Hawthorne -- a very handsome man -- moving like a self-impelled Greek statue.''

Could this be the source for another book humanizing Hawthorne?

^{http://www.nytimes.com/2003/08/11/books/rosy-days-fatherhood-far-scarlet-letter-rediscovered-story-nathaniel-hawthorne.html?pagewanted=print}